to the number of six thousand, in the Circus,[282] and at the same time he summoned the Senate to the temple of Bellona.  As soon as he began to speak, the men who were appointed to do the work began to cut down the six thousand men.  A cry naturally arose from so many men being butchered in a narrow space, and the Senators were startled; but Sulla preserving the same unmoved expression of countenance, bade them attend to what he was saying, and not trouble themselves about what was going on outside; it was only some villains who were being punished by his orders.  This made even the dullest Roman see that there was merely an exchange of tyrants, not a total change.  Now Marius was always cruel, and he grew more so, and the possession of power did not change his disposition.  But Sulla at first used his fortune with moderation and like a citizen of a free state, and he got the reputation of being a leader who, though attached to the aristocratical party, still regarded the interests of the people; besides this, he was from his youth fond of mirth, and so soft to pity as to be easily moved to tears.  It was not without reason, then, that his subsequent conduct fixed on the possession of great power the imputation that it does not let men’s tempers abide by their original habits, but makes them violent, vain, and inhuman.  Now whether fortune really produces an alteration and change in a man’s natural disposition, or whether, when he gets to power, his bad qualities hitherto concealed are merely unveiled, is a matter that belongs to another subject than the present.

XXXI.  Sulla now began to make blood flow, and he filled the city with deaths without number or limit; many persons were murdered on grounds of private enmity, who had never had anything to do with Sulla, but he consented to their death to please his adherents.  At last a young man, Caius Metellus, had the boldness to ask Sulla in the Senate-house, when there would be an end to these miseries, and how far he would proceed before they could hope to see them stop.  “We are not deprecating,” he said, “your vengeance against those whom you have determined to put out of the way, but we entreat you to relieve from uncertainty those whom you have determined to spare.”  Sulla replied, that he had not yet determined whom he would spare.  “Tell us then,” said Metellus, “whom you intend to punish.”  Sulla said that he would.  Some say that it was not Metellus, but Afidius,[283] one of Sulla’s flatterers, who made use of the last expression.  Sulla immediately proscribed eighty persons without communicating with any magistrate.  As this caused a general murmur, he let one day pass, and then proscribed two hundred and twenty more, and again on the third day as many.  In an harangue to the people, he said, with reference to these measures, that he had proscribed all he could think of, and as to those who now escaped his memory, he would proscribe them at some future time.  It was part of the proscription[284]